How Russia secretly paid millions to a bunch of big right-wing podcasters

A cadre of right-wing online personalities including Dave Rubin, Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, and Lauren Southern have all allegedly become unwitting agents of Russian information warfare and its activities in the United States, according to an alarming 32-page federal indictment unsealed by the US District Court of the Southern District of New York on Wednesday. The group of far-right and right-leaning influencers, most of whom are known for podcasts and YouTube shows, are all members or former members of Tenet Media, a Nashville-based content creation company co-owned by yet another well-known conservative media pundit, Lauren Chen. The Department of Justice is alleging that since its founding in 2022, Tenet has served as a front for Russian agents to spread Russian state-directed content using each of these pundits’ platforms. “The Justice Department will not tolerate attempts by an authoritarian regime to exploit our country’s free exchange of ideas in order to covertly further its own propaganda efforts,” US Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement. An FBI investigation found evidence that the media outlet RT, previously called Russia Today, which is run by the Russian government, “secretly plant[ed] and financ[ed]” a Tennessee content creation company; the indictment describes Tenet in all but name. The company is then alleged to have stealthily spread pro-Russian, anti-democracy propaganda to millions of people across the internet, primarily via YouTube, TikTok, and other major social media platforms. [Image: Conservative podcaster Benny Johnson. https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/gettyimages-2157145089.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] The whereabouts of the chief actors indicted in the scheme, RT employees Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva, are currently unknown. According to the indictment, the pair, who worked on digital projects for the outlet, used shell companies in the Middle East and Africa to secretly provide nearly $10 million to the company believed to be Tenet between October 2023 and August 2024, while directing it to spread anti-US and anti-Ukraine messaging. Per the indictment, the RT staffers “covertly fund[ed] and direct[ed]” Tenet and its content, including personally editing and posting content themselves and directing what others posted. They have both been charged with conspiracy to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), which requires foreign agents to publicly disclose their state-related activities, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. They could each face up to 25 years in federal prison. The associated influencers who have responded to the news have all claimed they knew nothing of Tenet’s Russian affiliations. “Should these allegations prove true, I as well as the other personalities and commentators were deceived and are victims,” Pool tweeted Wednesday. Though no charges have yet been filed against Chen, Donovan, or anyone associated with Tenet Media, the scandal has raised a maelstrom of questions about the Russian state’s ability to manipulate online discourse in the US, and the ways in which our hyper-polarized society might be making us vulnerable to exploitation by bad actors. Who was behind this? RT, the Russian state media outlet behind the alleged psyop (shorthand for “psychological operation” — a systematic attempt to influence others), has long been known for destabilizing activity on US social media and for spreading “anything that causes chaos” online. The outlet changed its name from Russia Today in 2009 to more proactively obscure its Russian origins following the Russia-Georgia conflict, and was classified a foreign entity by the DOJ in 2017, in an unprecedented move that allowed the US to more closely monitor its staff, who were also classed as foreign agents. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, RT media channels were banned in the US and many of its ally nations; despite this ban, the indictment alleges, “the Government of Russia continues to use RT to direct disinformation and propaganda at Western audiences.” RT ridiculed the US government’s allegations that it was behind the newly uncovered scheme, stating to Reuters, “Three things are certain in life: death, taxes and RT’s interference in the U.S. elections.” According to the Washington Post, RT sent a response to the allegations that included, “Hahahaha!” (“I’m sure that was much funnier in the original Russian,” Attorney General Merrick Garland told WaPo.) The indictment, however, is damning. It refers to a “Company 1” serving as the RT’s front as a self-described “network of heterodox commentators that focus on Western political and cultural issues,” which exactly matches Tenet Media’s website description of itself, among many other aligning details. Tenet Media was founded in January 2022 by Chen, whose legal name is believed to be Lauren Yu Sum Tam, and her husband Liam Donovan. Chen, who is originally from Quebec, is a former host for multiple shows on Glenn Beck’s far-right media network BlazeTV. According to the FBI’s investigation, Chen and Donovan referred to their RT backers as “the Russians” and knowingly gave them both access to the Tenet Discord server and the ability to post directly to Tenet social media accounts. Chen and Donovan also worked with Kalashnikov and Afanasyeva to deceive their network of conservative podcasters. The Russians made numerous fake user profiles to further the deception; to dupe members of their network and at least one unnamed potential influencer, the Russians allegedly used barebones LinkedIn pages, a fake CV, and a fake French website to create one fictional French financier with the totally-not-made-up name “Eduard Grigoriann.” The other fake personas created by Kalashnikov and Afanasyeva then promoted the fake Grigoriann (they spelled his name wrong repeatedly in doing so) and dodged basic questions the podcasters asked about his identity. The fake CV for Eduard Grigoriann, partially redacted and blurred by the DOJ. At one point, whoever was pretending to be the fake Grigoriann scheduled a Zoom call with the commentator they were trying to impress, only to strategically be absent for the conference after claiming to have shown up for the meeting at the wrong time due to time zones. As slipshod and transparent as these attempts seem to have been, they were effective; two of the pundits entered into contracts of between $400,000-$500,000 a month to create video content for the fake Grigoriann. Most of the $10 million in funding that Tenet received went to creator studios, including, per the indictment, “$8.7 million to the production companies of Commentator-I, Commentator-2, and Commentator-3 alone.” Who were the affected conservative influencers? The group targeted by RT was an impressive array of big-deal conservative and/or right-leaning YouTubers. Dave Rubin is the most prominent pundit on the list, suspected to be one of the higher-paid commentators discussed in the indictment. He was dropped from Tenet’s roster four months ago, according to a statement he issued via Twitter on Wednesday; he called the show he made for Tenet “silly.” The other five influencers are: Tim Pool, known for his Timcast IRL podcast; Lauren Southern, a Canadian alt-right influencer who quit the movement to become a tradwife, then returned to public life after alleging her husband mistreated her; serial plagiarist turned podcaster Benny Johnson; self-described independent journalist Tayler Hansen, whose main gig seems to have been working for Tenet Media as a “field reporter”; and podcaster Matt Christiansen, known for broadcasting from the wilderness, who had made Tenet his primary streaming platform prior to this. [Image: Lauren Southern, a right-wing influencer. https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/chorus/uploads/chorus_asset/file/21984608/674157310.jpg.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] On a Wednesday night livestream, Christiansen claimed the FBI had contacted him earlier that day for a voluntary interview, and that investigators see him as a victim of the scheme and not a knowledgeable participant. The indictment indicated as much, describing all of the Tenet network members as unwitting dupes of the Russians. Pool posted, then reposted, a statement denying any knowledge of the ruse. “I cannot speak for anyone else at the company as to what they do or to what they are instructed,” he stated. “Never at any point did anyone other than I have full editorial control of the show and the contents of the show are often apolitical. Examples include discussing spirituality, dating, and videos [sic] games.” Johnson stated that the deal he had with Tenet was “arm’s length” and that it had since expired. (He and Rubin are still featured on the company’s promotional website.) “We are disturbed by the allegations in today’s indictment, which make clear that myself and other influencers were victims in this alleged scheme,” he said. What sort of information did they spread? So what exactly was Tenet spreading at the behest of the Kremlin? A look at their social platforms reveals a litany of far-right political talking points, ranging from transphobic fearmongering and anti-immigrant rants to demonizing protesters and criticizing abortion — as well as a steady flow of anti-Ukrainian messaging. “While the views expressed in the videos are not uniform, the subject matter and content of the videos are often consistent with the Government of Russia’s interest in amplifying U.S. domestic divisions in order to weaken U.S. opposition to core Government of Russia interests, such as its ongoing war in Ukraine,” the indictment observed. The Russians not only contracted the most prominent influencers to create content for them through their fake financier, at various points they directly edited the footage submitted to them. One Tenet staffer identified as a “producer” in the indictment protested, when asked to post a video promoting a US influencer’s visit to a Russian grocery store, that it felt like “shilling.” He was ordered to post the content anyway. The Russians would also request that creators make specific content, including, for example, videos about a terrorist attack in Moscow. The sad part of all this, however, is that this kind of content has become so mundane across the conservative internet that it’s nearly impossible to distinguish what comes directly from the Russian government and what originates from the influencers they employed. After all, while the six figures who were contracted with Tenet might have been unaware of or unbothered about who was paying them, they raised no objections to the content itself. (In fact, the only objection noted in the indictment is a complaint one of the podcasters raised that Grigoriann’s bio was suspect because he mentioned a focus on “social justice.”) That, perhaps, speaks to how effective Russia’s disinformation war has really been. The indictment claimed that from November 2023 to August 2024, Tenet network members created over 2,000 videos among them, which generated 16 million views for Tenet and its Russian benefactors. At the time the scandal broke, Tenet Media’s YouTube channel had a not-insignificant 300,000 subscribers. That’s not a shabby number by any means, but it pales beside the larger, unquantifiable scale of influence itself. Rubin’s Rubin Report and Johnson’s YouTube channel each have over 2.4 million subscribers, while Tim Pool’s Timcast IRL channel has nearly 1.9 million. Many of those audience members are actively engaged in political conversations online, disseminating these views further. It’s unclear what opinions began as propaganda and what opinions the commentators came by honestly, but in either case it seems their backers are willing to pay for the output. The Russian disinformation campaign in the US has long relied on third-party actors to do its work for it, from bots to trolls to social media farms, journalists, and hackers. (Ironically, Tenet’s last Instagram post attacked a member of New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s staff who was arrested for allegedly taking bribes and committing forgery in order to further the political interests of the Chinese Communist Party in New York.) The identification of an entire US-based content company dedicated to doing this work for Russia isn’t ultimately that surprising given what we know about the Kremlin’s tactics. But it does raise the much grimmer question: What else is Russia doing on the disinformation front? And will we ever know how much damage they have wrought?